I tried Obsidian but prefer Foam[0], just because I enjoy using VSCode. Once it ...

phre4k · on Aug 19, 2020

Can't you already navigate with the tree view instead of materialised backlinks? What's the benefit?

I prefer to link my sites organically inside of text in the page. E.g. on a page about Linux I'd write

GNU/Linux is an [operating system](../os) based on the Linux [Kernel](../kernel).

Tada, two backlinks without having to list them. If there's no link on the page it's not important.

Do you see problems with that approach?

refresher · on Aug 19, 2020

I actually do like the 'explore backlinks' pane for Foam so it would be of some navigational use for me. They list reasons for adding it as:

> Make every link two-way navigable in published sites

> Make Foam notes more portable to different apps and long-term storage

(via https://foambubble.github.io/foam/materialized-backlinks)

Though I may be getting confused between the backlink differences that Foam, Obsidian, and Roam offer. A list of forward links per document would actually be useful as well, which IIRC neither Foam or Obsidian offer at the moment. Obsidian also shows the user 'unlinked mentions' along with explicit backlinks, which is also a nice feature that Foam lacks.